Principal Investigator

KURITA Akiyoshi THE INSTITUTE FOR SCIENCE OF LABOUR,DIVISION OF WORKING LIFE AND SOCIAL POLICY,SENIOR RESEARCHER, 労働社会生活研究部, 主任研究員 (10072654)

Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha)

SUZUI Haruko THE INSTITUTE FOR SCIENCE OF LABOUR,DIVISION OF WORKING LIFE AND SOCIAL POLICY,R, 労働社会生活研究部, 研究員 (20221327)
SHINABE Yoshihiro THE INSTITUTE FOR SCIENCE OF LABOUR,DIVISION OF WORKING LIFE AND SOCIAL POLICY,S, 労働社会生活研究部, 研究部長 (40142070)
WASHITANI Tetu THE INSTITUTE FOR SCIENCE OF LABOUR,DIVISION OF WORKING LIFE AND SOCIAL POLICY,S, 労働社会生活研究部, 主任研究員 (00124313)

Securing and developing farming and forestry workforce in one of the most important tasks in Japanese hilly and mountainous areas today. This is shown by the known fact that aging of workers became apparent in agriculture and forestry about 20 years earlier then in urban areas and in other economic sectors. In hilly and mountainous rural areas, in particular, people of age 65 or more accounted for 21.7 per cent of the population already in 1995, a rate as high as the corresponding rate in urban areas in 2025 as a whole.However, the effects of the current economic recession have been exerting upon the shortage of workforce in agricultural and forestry sector. A lot of householders of part-time farmers employed in industry and services who have been aged groups of workers retired and have engaged in the agriculture sector as regularly engaged farmers. Further, there have been appearing many metropolitan elderly workers who hope to enter into the agricultural sector by choice of one "post
… More-retirement life plans", about 8 per cent accounted for medium and minor enterprises elderly workers in case of the results of an investigation in 1995, and about 16 per cent of our previous study on major enterprises in 1993. On the other side, about 33 per cent accounted for agricultural cooperatives in hilly and mountainous areas had accepted U-tern farmers returning from urban areas or from other industries and about 14 per cent of them had received new entrants without previous farming experiences during the last jive years, while only 32 per cent of them had accepted new farmers following school graduation during the period in case of the results of a questionnaire study on all agricultural cooperatives in 1994. While half of the studied cooperatives mentioned mechanization as a measure being taken to secure workforce, the future measures favored by them included the effective utilization of aged and female workforce, administering farm lands and the support for U-turn from farmers and new entrants.Our conclusions thus point to the need of taking multi-faced measures adapted to each local situation. There is a clear need of accepting all sorts of persona who have the will and the ability to engage in agricultural and forestry labor. Less